Taleb dunking on IQ “research” at length. Technically a seriouspost I guess.
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This is good:
Take the sequence {1,2,3,4,x}. What should x be? Only someone who is clueless about induction would answer 5 as if it were the only answer (see Goodman’s problem in a philosophy textbook or ask your closest Fat Tony) [Note: We can also apply here Wittgenstein’s rule-following problem, which states that any of an infinite number of functions is compatible with any finite sequence. Source: Paul Bogossian]. Not only clueless, but obedient enough to want to think in a certain way.
Also this:
If, as psychologists show, MDs and academics tend to have a higher “IQ” that is slightly informative (higher, but on a noisy average), it is largely because to get into schools you need to score on a test similar to “IQ”. The mere presence of such a filter increases the visible mean and lower the visible variance. Probability and statistics confuse fools.
And:
If someone came up w/a numerical“Well Being Quotient” WBQ or “Sleep Quotient”, SQ, trying to mimic temperature or a physical quantity, you’d find it absurd. But put enough academics w/physics envy and race hatred on it and it will become an official measure.
Unlucky 10000: There is an EQ, or emotional quotient, and I was given an EQ test in high school (like age 17-18, don’t remember exactly). Fortunately, it was just done for fun by a lone teacher, but I could see it becoming popular in a future school system.
This shit is just as bad, frankly. The quest to quantify and then rank All The Things is inherently dangerous.
Testing EQ would probably be opposed as “woke” by conservative parents in the school district.
Nah, they’re okay with it because it reinforces their belief that a person is either high-empathy or low-empathy, with higher EQ being better. In general, conservatives love standardized tests and grades, because it grants the appearance of merit, which is essential for meritocracy.
Side note, I know Taleb is widely appreciated, but man this is some badly written stuff. Is all his stuff like this? I realize blog post != book, but c’mon, some pride in craftmanship is in order.
yes, way too much of it is. Taleb is extremely smart, but nobody is as smart as Taleb thinks he is.
I think the most bitter part is him taking pride in his “real life” intelligence and his condemnation of test takers as “lifeless bureaucrats who can muster sterile motivation”. There is a callous hubris there, I suspect fueled by resentment of past interactions with quacks and/or holier than thou academics, the remedy isn’t becoming holier than thou in turn.
Sneering is fun/cathartic, othering less so.
NOTE: As a mindless drone pencil pusher myself, prone to to investigate things that don’t clearly matter immediately to the “real world”; I might be a tad defensive here ^^.
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@dgerard or as insufferable. I couldn’t get more than half a chapter into Black Swan because his writing style was so damned offputting.
he really gives off that condensed “stick it to the man” vibe
All the same content is in fooled by randomness and it’s far far shorter
Unfortunately he is an atrocious narcissist
High-end stats is kind of Taleb’s thing, so he gets to be as insufferable as he likes dunking on IQiots imo.
Yeah, he needs an editor. But the relentless dunking on IQiots is worth the verbiage imo.
IQ is a relatively recent construct.
My father (b. 1913) was one of the children chosen to calibrate the Stanford Binet IQ test after it moved from Europe to Stanford University.
Having a high IQ didn’t make much difference for an alcoholic manic depressive attorney who could insult you in English, French, German, and Arabic.
He became an embezzler who lost everything and ended up dying in my one-year-old daughter’s bedroom after his last wife threw him out.
A few days before he died, he seemed to confess to murdering his first wife.
IQ may predict other things than it was designed for.
Wtf? When has IQ been purported to be a measure of how well adjusted some is.
it hasn’t but it has been promoted as a predictor of success in education, work and life. The Bell Curve famously claimed that higher IQ people were more likely to finish education, stay in work, stay out of prison and stay married.
Fair enough.
Importantly, even where a very spare analysis which gets to pick and choose its terms and data (i.e. any analysis which begins by frontloading (1) measured - actually etimated - IQ and the traditional and (2) unanalysed markers by which success is judged) finds that there is a crude regularity whereby IQ and success are correlated, in practical terms nobody will ever - and I mean EVER - use this data to support conclusions which follow from the discovery of a crude regularity. This is partly a human cognition thing and mostly an ideology thing, but the human cognition thing is an important cause. It’s very difficult, practically impossible, for people not to move from a continuous result (the crude regularity) to a categorical conclusion (one which parses between individuals) - and fortunately, for the bigot, this already plays into the bigoted attitude.
Ignoring the racism behind IQ tests for a second…
IQ can’t measure intelligence, because even if you’re smart as hell in one topic you can be dumb as hell in another. Hell, people in MENSA prove that themselves by paying YEARLY to validate their intelligence lmao. Gives me Peggy Hill “certified genius” vibes
My dad is a smart guy so he applied to join Mensa in the 80s. Incidentally he was also an amateur soccer player at the time. Anyway he did the first test which was free and passed it. There was a second test which you did have to pay for but it wasn’t that expensive so he did it and passed. But then there was a third test you also had to pay for…so he didn’t join. Gave him a good story.
On the rational wiki page for Mensa it says that the founder of the organization left when it was quite young, commenting that conversations between self-validated smart people quickly devolved into “mental masturbation”…
Some of us need the validation because we can’t do well in sports. Is every athlete a fool for paying to participate and compete in their sport? Mensa actually had a lot of special interest groups and it filters out people who don’t want to have intelligent conversation.
what is it with the @lemmy.x domains and horribly shit takes
they’re usually extremely unfocused open registration instances established to attract folks who, charitably, have been tricked by Reddit and other social media into thinking their posts don’t have to be funny or interesting
Some of us need the validation because we can’t do well in sports.
Life is more than high school, my friend.
@gerikson @LeadSoldier not if you peaked in highschool
I’ll go one further: “intelligence” as conceived by “IQ” is a mostly meaningless concept and the word, when used in everyday English, mostly just means “agrees with me”
What books(ideally books pls) would you guys recommend to anyone caught up in IQ stuff? Especially for people outside the US? Ignore if wrong place to ask this, my bad there.
Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man is always a good place to start.
Will find a copy, thank you!
For anyone who hasn’t watched it this video is an excellent breakdown of the racist history of both The Bell Curve and of IQ tests.
Hi, could you perhaps elaborate a bit on the racist history of the bell curve? I’m well aware of the racist history of IQ, but I don’t even have an inkling of what that’s referring to in the context of the bell curve. It’s just the graph of a normal distribution, is this referring to some weird application of it to some racist shit?
PS: I know you’ve attached a video with info on it and me asking might be kinda dumb. However, I saw it’s 2+hrs and I don’t have the time to watch it right now but I’m still interested.
I feel that my comment was a little ambiguous.
The Bell Curve mentioned isn’t the graph distribution, but rather the book by the same name that uses misrepresented data from IQ tests to push the idea that there is a genetic factor that makes black people inherently less intelligent than anyone else.
Sorry for any misunderstandings.
also, the video you linked is very good and well worth the time investment. for anyone who can’t watch the video, RW has a good article along the same lines
Using that same logic, Hitler was a vegetarian, so vegetarians must be racist.
Or, a more mature response, sometimes real things get misused by racists. IQ test predict performance with the same self-identified racial groups, so what explains that? It can’t be racism, since they are the same race.
Here’s two studies that tested for heritability of IQ.
IQ test predict performance with the same self-identified racial groups, so what explains that?
No source here so I can only assume where you got this data. The most commonly cited source for this is the one used in The Bell Curve which compared test scores of black children in America immediately post segregation and apartheid South Africa against white American children. So, like, obviously the segregated underclass in two deeply racist countries is gonna have a lower quality of education.
I never said it was genetically heritable, my point is simply that it’s predictive of future life outcomes.
The source being the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, which has shown this with each cohort tested.
It’s gonna take me a bit to figure out how to use the website for NLSY79 so bear with me on that.
The youngest of the cohort in 1979 was 14, since segregation was only officially ended in 1965, it once again seems more likely the legacy of segregation and America’s continued racist culture had a larger impact on outcomes than IQ test scores to me.
But, I’m a biologist not a sociologist, so not really my field of expertise.
Edit: the National Longitudinal Study of Youth doesn’t even test for IQ, this has been a waste of time.
sorry you had to deal with this lying racist shithead. let me know if hexbear deals with them in a satisfactory way — it’s always good to know how other instances deal with “polite” racist shitheads who try to slip their bullshit in under a thin veneer of misapplied science
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The youngest of the cohort in 1979 was 14, since segregation was only officially ended in 1965, it once again seems more likely the legacy of segregation and America’s continued racist culture had a larger impact on outcomes than IQ test scores to me.
Everything in this ignores what I said in my first comment: this persists within the same racial group
Segregation explains nothing about why people of the same race would perform differently based on IQ scores when they were young.
the National Longitudinal Study of Youth doesn’t even test for IQ, this has been a waste of time.
Yes it does, it’s one of the most widely cited studies for IQ research. My uni had the class do a research project based on this study, you might just be looking at the wrong page.
Yes it does, it’s one of the most widely cited studies for IQ research. My uni had the class do a research project based on this study, you might just be looking at the wrong page.
It doesn’t, see attached screenshot of tests carried out on the cohort.
The ASVAB is considered one of the accepted forms of IQ tests, as long it is proctored, like the NLSY does.
Other studies might use other IQ tests like the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale or Raven’s Progressive Matrices Test.
oh do fuck off
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Smart people talk about ideas or hobbies or whatever it is they’re focused on.
Dumb people talk about their IQ and how it means whatever half baked conclusions they decide to jump to.
who the heck knows their iq. don’t you have to go out of your way to take that test?
Comparison between attention-sensitive and attention-insensitive IQ tests are considered diagnostic for ADHD.
I know mine. I took an IQ test in my early 20s and got a high score on it. Didn’t mean a whole lot for me, I had already dropped out of highschool, then I drunked out of college and wound up fixing trash trucks for 10 years.
The big problem with IQ is that it’s horribly misapplied. It’s a predictor for how you will do in education. That is all it was designed to do and all it has ever been validated for. It does that ok, not great but well enough to be statistically significant. It has some reasonable use in identifying extreme outliers (the roughly 5% of people more than 2 standard deviations from the mean) which is useful for getting the roughly 2.5% of people more than 2 standard deviations below the mean the additional resources and care they need. There are no other valid community uses for IQ and for the vast majority of people it’s a meaningless number. It unfortunately found a place in pop culture and in business and government recruitment when realistically it’s use should have always been limited to research and selective clinical/educational applications (identifying people that need extra resources). Mass testing is undisputably a waste of resources because of how little useful information it generates and the high risk of misuse of basically meaningless results of the 95% that are within the normal range.
Don’t forget its other use: corralling high-IQ children into Talented & Gifted programs. Gotta stigmatize them early. (It’s okay, I’m allowed to joke about this; I maxed out an IQ test as a child and was shoved into T&G for grade school.)
It was disappointing to see Veritasium not applying much critical analysis to IQ testing in his video.
He really should of downplayed it’s significance more.
I don’t even want to watch that video because I know I’m going to get annoyed by it. Veritasium’s video on self-driving cars was so awful, it was enough for me to just sort them into the Sketchy Pop-Sci YouTube Channels bucket for good. I’ve heard that their videos on electricity and that one physics bet were also pretty shaky.
I know a really smart guy who apparently scored 70. This guy invented a complicated machine that is now widely used.
Then why does the National Longitudinal Study of Youth show that people who do well on IQ tests at a young age do so much better later in life? They make higher incomes and are less likely to be imprisoned.
This is after controlling for race, or income. People with higher IQ scores do better than people of the same race with lower scores. Among high-income people, those with higher IQs do better. Among the poor, high IQ people end up better off later in life than those born in the same conditions.
Each time IQ comes up here, everyone ignores that study. The NLSY ahs been done on multiple cohorts, and shows the same results each time.
Usually the response is just to call people names like “racist” despite this factor being show within the same race.
You have just demonstrated that you don’t understand Taleb’s critique. Admittedly, his basic critique is buried in tons of verbiage, but your response here is an irrelevance.
IQ measurements are next to useless on an individual level because a) IQ measurement is terrible & non-repeatable with very large variance between successive tests for any given individual & b) IQ doesn’t measure the thing you actually want, which is task-specific performance: it has terrible correlation with any given task-specific measure, barely rising above “vaguely related”.
At the population-level, IQ suffers from terrible statistical issues, including circularity affecting outcomes (SAT tests in the US are a particular problem), and inter-population differences that make comparisons extremely noisy. The field is also historically full of charlatans who literally made up data out of thin air, even before you start in with the problems with the actual data they drew upon & the stats they applied to it.
Ultimately, It doesn’t matter that you can measure some “factor” and show that there’s a weak correlation with lifetime wealth, or prison likelihood or whatever if that measurement is an otherwise useless one: Using IQ as a measure of an individual is wildly inappropriate. Using it as a population measure is next to useless because of widespread issues with both the input data & the statistical analysis done to torture some kind of correlation out of said data & call the job done.
Finally, when you’ve done all these population level stats on your so-called “g-factor” and squeezed some kind of vague relationship between various groups & your “g-factor” out of the data, what are you doing that /for/? What good do you expect to do in the world with that information? Because the only real-world use seems to be advocating for blocking the immigration or education of specific groups of people, despite the fact that, as has already been pointed out, you cannot use IQ on an individual level because it has extremely poor predictive value at the individual level. Sounds … kind of racist don’t you think?
